Deer in landfill? Wait and see, panel decides

May 10, 2002 Capital Times (Madison, WI) by Bill Novak

While the commission in charge of the Dane County landfill isn't
ruling out burying thousands of deer carcasses at the landfill site,
it wants to take a "wait and see"
approach to the idea, and will most likely abide by any carcass
disposal plans put together between the Department of Natural
Resources and a chronic wasting disease
task force being set up by county officials.

The county's Solid Waste and Recycling Commission rejected a
motion to ban burying 15,000 deer, the estimated total number living
in the DNR's eradication zone in
western Dane County, eastern Iowa County and a small section of Sauk County.

While the Dane County landfill remains one option for the
disposal of the deer carcasses when the eradication kill begins, the
DNR lost one option of disposal when the
Sauk County Board's Environmental Resources Committee voted
unanimously Thursday to not accept deer carcasses from Dane County.

"No way in hell do we want 750 tons or so of deer in our
landfill," said Supervisor John Schmitz, chairman of the committee.
"We'll probably take in the ones shot in
Sauk County, but the deer shot in Dane County is just too many
animals." The Dane County Towns Association also doesn't want to see
thousands of deer carcasses in the
county landfill.

Harold Krantz, town chair of Cross Plains and a member of the
solid waste commission, said the association voted unanimously
Wednesday night to advise the county not to
use the landfill as a disposal site.

Dumping the carcasses into a landfill is the easiest and quickest
way to dispose of the animals, but it might not be the safest, which
has county officials concerned.

The main concern is the long-range affect of CWD-laced deer
remains possibly leaching out into the groundwater.

The county executive's chief of staff, Topf Wells, said key
administrators most directly involved in the CWD crisis are forming
plans on how to deal with CWD, but it
might take some time before any action takes place.

"We are not in a situation where hundreds of dead deer would be
brought to the landfill at one time," Wells said. "From what we know
from the DNR, the shooting is going
to take longer than expected. It took the DNR, during an easier time
of the year to shoot, four weeks to shoot 500 deer."

Much of the coordination between the county's efforts and the DNR
will be handled by the CWD task force. The County Board's Executive
Committee voted unanimously to
set up the task force Thursday, and the idea will be brought before
the full board next Thursday.

The makeup of the task force was changed slightly by the
commission, with the addition of two citizen members. The 11-member
task force will consist of six
supervisors, the county executive or a representative, the Dane
County Conservation League president or designee, a farmer
recommended by the Farm Bureau and the
two citizen members.

If the task force and DNR decide dumping the deer carcasses in
the Dane County landfill is the best way to dispose of the kill, the
landfill will be able to take all of the deer
killed, the landfill's manager told the commission.

Gerald Mandli said the landfill takes in an average of 400 tons
of refuse a day, so dumping 1,000 tons or so of deer carcasses will
be easily handled.

Commissioners were somewhat concerned about being able to keep
track of where the deer carcasses are in the landfill, but Mandli
said the location will be marked
through a site survey, so landfill operators will know where the
remains are years from now.

Once the killing starts, carcasses would be brought to the
landfill in an erratic fashion, depending on how many deer are killed
on a given day. Usually, refuse is put into
the landfill in different places, but Mandli assured the commission
the deer carcasses would be dumped into one spot.

He also said none of the seven full-time workers at the landfill
has expressed concerns over handling thousands of deer carcasses.

"None of the carcasses would have human contact," Mandli said.
"The carcasses would be dumped into a trench, covered and rolled with
a compactor that weighs 120,000
pounds."

The landfill will easily handle 15,000 deer carcasses, but the
idea of eradicating 15,000 deer from the zone is a harder thing to
handle, Wells said.

"The overwhelmingly vast majority of the deer to be taken are
healthy," he said, "and that's the biggest tragedy. Out of 1,000
deer, 990 will be healthy."

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